“Chunking” spoken language - Introducing weak cesuras

With this special issue, we would like to present current Conversation-Analytic and Interactional-Linguistic work (see also Section 1.3) on the “units” of naturally occurring talk to a broader linguistic public. While there are methodological (and theoretical) differences to other, earlier approaches, we all share an interest in how language works in human interaction. One aspect of the workings of human language is its being produced in spurts or chunks. Yet, especially when applying chunking models, such chunks are not always easy to separate and thus to identify. Moreover, when studying the fuzzier instances of boundaries of such chunks in more detail, it turns out that participants can use them for interactional purposes. This is what this special issue aims to topicalize.